EAST HAMPTON >> Caught in a bureaucratic snafu with millions of dollars in state funding at stake, the School Building Committee has set itself an ambitious task.

Even as it works with a state agency to ensure continued funding for the high school renovation project, the committee is also working with two state legislators on wholly different approach to the problem.

The all-volunteer committee is also pressing both the construction management company and the project architects to explain and defend their actions in supplying needed documentations to the state — and why they did not alert the committee to the possibility of lost funding.

And finally, although it is been largely lost in a welter of charge, countercharge, and an avalanche of criticism that led to an effort to “fire” them, the committee is also overseeing the continuing the reconstruction project itself.

The committee last month was stunned to learn the state Department of Administrative Services has recategorized the $51 million school renovation project to a different classification which could cost the town $7 million in state reimbursement.

This came even as the project, which began in November, continues apace.

On Thursday, during their regular weekly meeting, the committee sought to untangle the spaghetti-like strands of confusion over the classification, its likely impact, lost documents, documents submitted late, who was at fault, and how to come out of this matter without costing the town any more money.

The DAS has said it will no longer classify the project as “renovate-as-new,” which was eligible for the previously agreed upon 50-percent reimbursement from the state.

To begin untangling the confusion, committee vice chairwoman Michelle Barber, Superintendent of School Diane Dugas and Town Manager Michael Maniscalo met Thursday with DAS commissioner Melody A. Currey and several DAS and Office of School Facilities staff and officials.

“I felt it was a very productive meeting. We certainly learned a lot about the process,” Barber told the committee during its late afternoon meeting.

Barber said she asked Currey for a timeline to understand when and how the project suddenly was reclassified.

The answer is both the size of the school, which was originally built in 1963, and falling enrollment, Barber said.

“Our building is oversized. It has larger space than what is eligible for the enrollment projections for the next eight years,” Barber reported.

She then asked Currey, “What have we to do actually to get this (back) to ‘renovate as new?’”

Currey said the committee would have to reduce the size of the school, from 118,000 square feet to just under 99,000 square feet.

But when Barber said, “Do you think we can get it down to a number to something that is actually acceptable,” she said Currey replied, “Probably not.”

Despite that answer, “We’re working with the state” to go through the administrative process to try and get the “renovate as new” designation restored, Barber said.

“We haven’t got a ‘no’ yet,” Barber said — although she acknowledged, “We’re probably going to get a ‘no.’”

That said, “I feel better today than I did when I woke up this morning,” Barber said.

“This is not the first school of this vintage to run into this problem,” pointed out Donald A. Harwood, the director of facilities for the school system.

Harwood accompanied the East Hampton delegation to the meeting with DAS.

“Mrs. Barber did a good job. “The state is willing to go back and look” at the project, Harwood said.

In their discussions with DAS, the town contingent went through “some of the challenges of this building,” Harwood said.

Those challenges include internal circulation, the width of the corridors (which are larger than current standards call for), as well as the traffic patterns within the school, and the size of the auditorium.

Harwood also pointed out that the site on which the school sits does not lend itself to building a new smaller school to satisfy the DAS while maintaining the existing school, which would then be demolished.

That said, “The time we spent with DAS was extremely beneficial for us,” Harwood said.

“I don’t look this as a negative; I look it as how to work with the state,” Harwood said.

Later the same evening, Barber went before the Town Council, three of whose members had tried but failed to dismiss the seven members of the committee and have the council take over the functions of the building committee.

One councilor angrily denounced the committee, saying, “We told them to be here and they didn’t even come!”

However, the committee was holding its regular meeting, while the council had reschedule its meeting to Thursday because of last week’s snowstorm.

Barber sought to defuse that anger, telling the council, “I don’t think you can even imagine how upset we are.”

She then reviewed the meeting with DAS, telling the councilors the town had stressed the fact the school project was undertaken to comply with recommendations from a regional agency that awards accreditation to qualified schools.

As the committee pursues several options, Barber said, “We don’t plan to spend a dime more than $27 million,” the town’s share of the project that was approved by voters in 2013.